Chiaki Hiraoka, 49, who is working at Auto Alliance Thailand (AAT) on loan from Mazda, serves as the manager of stamping and body processing operations there. He worked at Mazda Manufacturing USA Corporation (MMUC), but came back to Japan shortly after the company was reshaped into Auto Alliance International (AAI), a joint venture between Ford and Mazda. With the start-up of the plant just a couple of weeks away, Mr Hiraoka was very candid. "I want to take up a second challenge and achieve what I failed to achieve at MMUC," he admitted.
In the stamping shop, operations toward full-scale production have already begun. Automatic presses are stamping out metal sheets one after another, with each piece checked for quality by Thai employees. "The atmosphere has become tense." Mr. Hiraoka senses a peculiar tension in the facial expressions of his employees during the period just before the plant starts up.
The kind of group activities Mazda introduced into MMUC have been carried over on to the production line of AAT. They include the 'Three S Campaign', a drive to keep the plant clean and well-organized with everything in place, and Kaizen (improvement) activities, whereby line workers come up with suggestions to improve the line and work procedures. In a mixture of Japanese and English, Mr. Hiraoka repeatedly says to his Thai subordinates, "I want the work to proceed smoothly. I would like all of you who are actually working on the line to be active in making suggestions to improve operations." He hopes to nurture in the workers the sense that they are the main players in the manufacturing process.
"The employees here understand their work and group activities much more quickly than those at MMUC did," says Mr. Hiraoka. The reason for that is the training the Thai employees received at Mazda Head Office, which started in September 1996. While similar training for MMUC employees lasted for only one-and-a-half months for each group of trainees, the period of training for AAT workers was extended to between 6 months and 1 year. In addition to teaching them Mazda's production methods, the aim was to enable them to experience how to cope with failures and trouble.
Up until November last year, when he was sent to AAT, Mr. Hiraoka had been in charge of training as the Staff Manager of the Thai J/V Project Office. When he worked at MMUC from 1986 to 1992, he came up against the language barrier. One of the aims for extending the training period for Thai employees was to have them learn some Japanese.
While he was working out the content of the training, Mr Hiraoka was haunted by his bitter experience in the U.S. At MMUC, when the line stopped due to malfunction, workers in charge of manufacturing did nothing at all to correct the trouble. Even the simplest repair, if made by a worker in charge of manufacturing, could outrage the union because, "It was a violation of the occupational category of maintenance workers." The effort to establish Mazda-style manufacturing at MMUC was defeated halfway through, in the face of the American labor practice which prevented workers from doing jobs that belong to job categories other than their own.
It was on April 12, 1996, that Mr Hiraoka learned that someone from Ford would be installed as the president of Mazda. He could not sleep that night. "Was it MMUC that dragged the company down? Was my lackluster performance there partly to blame for this?" As a Mazda employee who was involved in MMUC operations, Hiraoka admits he was filled with mortification, feeling that he was in part responsible for the company's plight.
In retrospect, Mr. Hiraoka now thinks they may have been too pushy in introducing the Japanese style. Their over-eagerness resultied from the fact that it was their very first manufacturing venture abroad. As a result of his experience in the United States he has modified his approach, "Use the Mazda style as a basis, but also use common sense to modify it." He tells this to his Thai employees. It is advice based on the levelheaded analysis that it is good to incorporate local styles to ensure smooth operation.
Tadayuki Murai, 52, Vice-President of AAT in charge of manufacturing, also takes a low-key approach, "Mazda and our Thai employees are working in harmony. We will work together with the Thai employees to shape up this plant."
The Thai employees are now entrusted with Mazda's production method. In some sense, AAT, which Mazda runs jointly with Ford in Thailand, is the place where Mazda is trying to regain the confidence it almost lost in the United States.
